Another arm reached out from somewhere, grabbing her around the waist. For a moment her rescuer seemed to totter; and then they were on the move, Melantha's jaw and neck bouncing painfully as he ran with her across the grass. The spots of her near-suffocation were fading away, but to her surprise she found she still couldn't see anything. The streetlights that had been blazing earlier from Riverside Drive had gone completely dark.

"She's gone!" a deep Gray voice boomed from behind her.

There was a flurry of movement from that direction, footsteps and shouts and voices calling to her mind. Her forward motion was abruptly halted, and she felt herself being clutched closer to her rescuer's body as he began to climb the wall the Grays had been hanging onto a few minutes earlier.

She tensed as he climbed, waiting for the inevitable shouts of discovery and the sounds of pursuit.

But all the activity seemed to be moving away from her, either deeper into the darkness of the park or back toward the garden and the stone steps. A moment later she and her rescuer reached the top of the wall and the upper promenade, and once again she found her chin bouncing painfully against his shoulder as he ran silently along the ground.

"You okay?" a gruff voice murmured in her ear. "Melantha?"

It took two tries to get any words out through her half-paralyzed throat. "I'm okay," she wheezed.

Her voice was the voice of a stranger. "Who—?"

"It's Jonah," he said; and this time, she recognized the voice. "Don't try to talk."

Melantha stiffened. That last word had been more grunted than spoken, and for the first time she noticed how labored his breathing sounded. Lifting her left hand from the arm still wrapped around her waist, she carefully touched his chest with her fingertips.

And jerked away as she touched wetness. "Jonah!"

"Don't try to talk," he said again, his breathing sounding even more ragged. "It's okay."